


Of Witches, Mixtapes, and Memory

by unnieunnie



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 90s, Alternate Universe - College/University, Disastrous exes, Jongdae is a mess, M/M, Magical Girls, Mature mostly for swearing drinking and references to drug use and sex, Mentions of sexual assault and violence - not explicit, No narrator so unreliable as the self-hating narrator, very slow burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2020-03-20 13:56:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18993988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unnieunnie/pseuds/unnieunnie
Summary: Even a tough customer like Kim Jongdae is shit out of luck when the campus witches decide to sort his life out for him. No matter how much of a disaster it is.-----------------





	Of Witches, Mixtapes, and Memory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BlitheBoa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlitheBoa/gifts).



> First BlitheBoa posted this art:
> 
> https://twitter.com/BumbleBoa/status/1131215529014960128
> 
> and then I found out it was her birthday, and here we are.

Reputations. They were everything. A reputation meant you got invited to the right parties. It meant you got noticed by the right people. It meant that the kids with more money and time on their hands than, say, a solid foundation in high moral character, would leave you the fuck alone and not pound your face into jelly if you happened to lose track of time at the library and walk back to your dorm alone at 1 am.

Reputations were crucial.

Kim Jongdae had a reputation for taking no shit and no prisoners. He had the faux hawk and the wardrobe full of shit-kickers, black t-shirts, and ragged denim. He could talk for more than 10 minutes about the virtues of The Clash versus Black Flag, and had actual opinions about how Green Day’s pop edge shouldn’t detract from their place at the forefront of contemporary punk. If he was really drunk, he’d admit to liking most ska. All the tragic little goth girls loved him because he was a reliable source of cloves and a good kisser who never pushed taking anything past second base but would, if encouraged, perform skillful oral sex with enthusiasm.

And if you got on his wrong side, he would loudly, publicly peel your skin off via an unerring instinct for guessing one’s darkest secrets and most trembling insecurities. People generally loved him, until they pissed him off. Then they gave him a wide fucking berth indeed.

For example: the way Zhang Yixing stepped into the doorway of whatever upperclassman lived in the beer-soaked, sweat- and pot-scented apartment hosting the latest rager, took one look at Jongdae across the room, scowled, and made a beeline for the kitchen opening on the other side of the room.

“My cup’s empty,” the girl tucked up against his side complained.

The keg was in the kitchen. Jongdae handed his cup over instead.

The party was dimly lit, so nobody would be able to tell that his face burned with shame just from seeing Yixing’s face. Not that anyone would believe that Kim Jongdae was capable of shame. Not the guy who had tripped over Yixing’s feet in the basement hallway of the arts building and drawled,

“Aren’t you the laziest fucker I’ve ever seen?”

As if he didn’t know that Yixing was passed out on the hallway floor because he had a full load of classes, a major role in the dance showcase, a co-writing credit for this semester’s musical, and a scholarship he had to maintain or be deported.

As if Yixing had ever been anything but super nice to him. And everybody else.

Reputations? Were bullshit.

Especially given that the scowl turned on him by Zhang Yixing was followed up by a scowl from Yixing’s roommate, the most beautiful man in the entire universe, Kim Minseok.

It was enough to ruin the party. Jongdae peeled himself away from his companion (Cha- something? Chae- something? The French major, anyhow, with a thing for Baudelaire, absinthe, and Belle & Sebastian. All those girls were great, but he couldn’t keep anybody’s name straight, there were just so many of them) and wormed his way through the crowd toward the door.

“Dude, you’re leaving?” Baekhyun shouted at him from 3 cm away.

“Yeah.”

“You’re always the first fucking one to leave, come on, stay.”

If Baekhyun’s breath was anything to go by, he’d been at the Jager bombs already.

“Nah, I’m gonna go.”

“You’re a lame asshole.”

“I know.”

It was a long-ass walk to his dorm on the other side of campus. Jongdae had been planning on finding a nice, warm bed somewhat closer by. Probably still could, if he turned around and went back inside, amid the crush of sweaty bodies, with alcohol loosening up his blood until his brain floated too freely to remember that expression on Minseok’s face. Or to imagine any other expression on Minseok’s face: what he looked like before he kissed someone, for example, or what he looked like when he came.

“Hey, hey, Jongdae,” a voice called out.

Great.

“Hey, Max.”

Tall, gorgeous, trust-fund senior Max. Minseok’s ex. Former fraternity brother of Jongdae’s own disastrous ex.

Because of course the people you most wanted to see when you felt like a shitheel loser were the ones who had seen you crying on the floor in a puddle of your own vomit.

“Party lame?”

Jongdae could never figure out whether it was really nice or really fucking insulting that Max always acted like he hadn’t ever picked a naked Jongdae up off the floor, washed him, and driven him home wearing an old track suit that he’d never asked to get back.

“Nah, it’s fine. I’m just not feeling it tonight.”

Max nodded. And then, because the person Jongdae could least resist hurting was always himself, he added,

“Minseok’s there.”

Max’s eyebrows did a thing. He squinted briefly, then smiled.

“Awesome, I haven’t seen him in a while, thanks.”

Jongdae turned to go.

“Hey,” Max called out.

Jongdae stopped but didn’t look back.

“Be careful walking home, yeah?”

Whatever.

Jongdae raised two fingers in a vee, popped the collar on his denim jacket as if it would make him any warmer, and went on his way.

 

Cold walk and cold bed aside, the benefits of walking out of a party early were several: the campus gym was empty, as were the showers, and a quiet, empty dorm meant that nobody was around to hear Jongdae sing.

There were people on campus who knew he could sing: his voice teacher, of course. And Baekhyun knew everything about him. But he could only imagine the damage that would be done to the walls that kept everyone out if they even once heard the smooth, classically trained tenor coming out of Jongdae’s mouth.

Baek had almost had him convinced to take the risk and audition for Xing’s musical. Before he’d made an ass of himself.

He stayed up way too late trying to work out the bridge on a song whose lyrics felt like they were on a schedule of arriving one word at a time, and only on the new moon or some shit. So he was as late as everybody else dragging to the cafeteria for carbs and coffee the next morning. Turning with his tray, Jongdae scanned the tables for a likely spot backed up to a wall and not too close to anyone.

He would’ve liked to sit with Baek and grouse about the stupidity of trying to create art - ever - but Baekhyun, despite waving cheerfully in his direction, was surrounded by his honor guard: Sehun and Kyungsoo, who never looked at Jongdae with anything less than pure hatred, and Chanyeol, who didn’t look unfriendly but was large enough to squash anyone like a bug.

Table for one it was, then.

The reputation was critical.

The reputation was also a fucking cage.

 

Another weekend, another party. The girl under his mouth was starting to gasp in a telling way, laid out on a pile of coats with her skirt pushed up.

“Fuck,” she sighed. “Yeah.”

He increased the speed of what he was doing with his tongue, sucked a little. Doing a nice thing for a nice person: it was one of the few times he didn’t feel like an irredeemable shithead, making somebody else feel good.

Jongdae heard a noise at the door and looked up, covering her with his hand in case it was a creeper.

He didn’t think Kim Minseok was a creeper. Anyhow, Minseok wasn’t looking at Joo ... Hee? (Accounting major, loved the beach. That time he stayed the night in her room, the only t-shirt she had that fit him had Hello Kitty on it, they had laughed so much that he actually fucked her. It was a good memory.)

Yeah. Minseok was staring at him, with a look in his dark eyes that Jongdae didn’t even want to try to fathom.

Joohee whimpered; Jongdae slid his thumb over her, hardly knowing what he was doing while he gawped at Minseok. Jongdae felt her buck and shudder. He closed his eyes against Minseok’s stare, grimaced. When he opened his eyes again, Minseok was gone and the door shut, so Jongdae got back to work.

“What can I do for you, baby?” she said afterward, kissing him like she thought she tasted delicious on him (valid – wasn’t she a vegetarian?), one foot pressing against his crotch.

“I’m good.”

Joohee looked at him, one hand on his cheek and her smile a little wry.

“One of those days, huh? Just gonna send me to the moon and not take anything for yourself?”

Jongdae shrugged. She kissed him again, then sat up and messed around at the back of her neck, pulling off one of her many silver necklaces.

“Somebody needs to do something about you, baby. Here, take this.”

She leaned in and clasped it around his neck. He couldn’t tell what the shape was when he ran his fingers over it.

“What is it?”

“It’s called a hamsa. It’s for protection.”

Jongdae squinted at her.

“I don’t need protection.”

“Everybody needs protection, Jongdae.”

Back in his dorm room, he looked at the little silver shape nestled in the hollow at the base of his neck. Like a fish, maybe, or even a stylized hand, filigreed with a tiny piece of blue glass in the center.

It was pretty cool, even if the protection thing was bullshit. He kept it on.

 

After that, Jongdae swore off parties for a while. He couldn’t shake his discomfort at the memory of Minseok’s flat gaze. He spent the next night in his room, listening to the subterranean rumble that silence had, until he couldn’t take it anymore and headed over to the arts building to practice.

It had been a while since he crept down into the basement practice rooms near midnight on a weekend – but not long enough to forget that Jongin would be there. Jongdae peered through the glass for a couple of minutes, watching. Jongin’s hair was literally dripping into his face, so he’d probably been there for hours already.

He never saw Jongin anywhere but in this building, and Jongin was so shy that they hadn’t spoken for the first month of their acquaintance. But he ran sound for most of the infinite number of student productions, and Jongdae ran lights, so they were stuck together in the tech booth for hours on end during rehearsals and shows, and eventually Jongdae got tired of feeling awkward. So he just showed up one day with extra snacks packed in his bag and acted like they were already friends.

Jongin had blinked at him but taken the snacks out of his hands, and by the end of that rehearsal, he had answered almost 10 whole questions in his deep, hesitating voice.

It had been the next month after that that Jongdae found him in a dance studio in the middle of the night. He was like a completely different person when he danced, all dangerous smiles and thirst-inducing body rolls.

“Holy fuck,” Jongdae had said, actually kind of thinking that fucking him might be a religious experience.

Except that Jongin had startled so hard that he fell down, and the switch flipped to his usual, stammering self.

“You can’t tell anybody!”

“I won’t, man.”

And of course, then Jongin was curious as to why Jongdae would be similarly creeping around the practice rooms in the middle of the night. Jongdae figured fair was fair and sang some Paganini for him, and they became the keepers of each other’s secrets.

“We’re probably idiots,” Jongin said once. “Sneaking around like this.”

It was probably true. Anyhow, Jongdae jogged back up the vending machines on the first floor and got an energy drink and a granola bar. He’d intended to place them outside the door to say hi without interrupting, but Jongin caught his eye through the glass and grinned that blinding smile at him.

“Hey,” he said around his heaving breath. “I’d hug you, but I’m disgusting. I haven’t seen you in forever.”

“Yeah, I tried to have a social life,” Jongdae shrugged. “But I’ve since seen the error of my ways.”

He handed over the snacks.

“I watched for a minute, earlier. You look great.”

Jongin flushed dark.

“I’m kind of. I heard Yixing’s musical is gonna have a chorus. I’m trying to. This is, I might.”

“You should,” Jongdae said. “Even if they stuck you all the way in the back, you’d steal the show.”

Jongin shook his head at the food in his hands.

“I don’t know. I’m trying to psych myself up for it.”

He looked up.

“Maybe we could audition together? For moral support.”

“Oh, no,” Jongdae said. “Nobody wants me in that musical.”

Jongin cocked his head.

“What are you talking about? Your voice is great, you know that.”

“My voice is fine, it’s the rest of me that comes with it that’s the problem.”

Jongin scowled.

“Yixing hates me anyway, he’d never cast me.”

“No he doesn’t,” Jongin said.

Jongdae gaped at him.

“How could you possibly know that?”

“I have modern dance with him,” Jongin said. “And Chanyeol. And Xing has a lit class with Baekhyun. I heard him tell Chanyeol a couple of weeks ago that he was worried about you, because you’d been super rude, and Baekhyun needed to check in with you.”

That was.

Impossible.

No, Jongdae was not even going to try to parse what the fuck that meant, so he took refuge in the other super unlikely part of that little speech.

“Chanyeol takes modern dance?”

“Yeah,” Jongin grinned. “He’s terrible.”

 

Jongdae’s strategic retreat into a solitary life wasn’t successful at all. He knew from long experience that Baekhyun would never go more than 72 hours without a Jongdae sighting before he’d camp out in the dorm hallway. That was fine. Baekhyun didn’t demand anything of him, other than the bare minimum of physical safety and a lot of hugging, and Jongdae liked the hugging part. Lying together on his bed, with Baek’s hand petting his hair, was about as relaxed as Jongdae ever got.

The only down side was that two of Baekhyun’s main topics of conversation ran along the lines of “you should sit with me at lunch” and “you should audition for the musical.”

But Jongdae had been resolutely ignoring 75% of all the words that came out of Baekhyun’s mouth since they were 13 years old, so he just snuggled in closer with his face against Baek’s neck, until Baekhyun sighed and gave up.

On a weirder level, the crowd of goth girls were suddenly everywhere. He was forever finding one or two of them loitering outside various classrooms. Deokmi (literature major, with a bottomless appetite for chocolate ice cream) grabbed his arm one day and never stopped talking long enough for him to get a protest in edgewise until he was seated with a tray full of lunch in front of him, and that one time apparently was enough to establish that he was supposed to eat lunch with them every day.

The first couple of days he caught Baekhyun’s eye across the cafeteria and shrugged at Baek’s ironic eyebrow wagging. He didn’t want to hurt Baekhyun’s feelings (though he probably did), but how was he supposed to say no to this level of smiling stubbornness?

Jongdae tried to grumble to himself that he missed his quiet lunches spent hunched over textbooks with his Walkman cranked up loud enough to drown out any other human noise. Except that there wasn’t any pressure involved. Nobody seemed to be flirting with him, even when he found one girl or another tucking herself up under his arm once he was done eating. They just talked to each other, and listened on the rare occasions that he interjected, like they cared what he had to say. A couple of times they got talking about music, and he found himself talking before he could even to think to stop himself, until he’d promised half a dozen dubs and mixtapes.

It was kind of nice, even if they sometimes treated him like some kind of pet. There was a lot of talk about it the day he wore a shirt with a low enough neck that Joohee’s hamsa showed.

“You’re still wearing it!” she shrieked, clapping her hands.

“Hey, aren’t your earlobes pierced?” Chaeyoung said, grabbing the part in question and making Jongdae’s shoulders leap up.

“Yeah?”

He never took the rings out of his upper ears, they were too much of a pain to put back in, but he never remembered to wear earrings in his actual lobes.

“Here, hold still.”

Chaeyoung took one of her own earrings out and slid it through his earlobe. Jongdae blinked.

“It’s an ankh, for blessings,” she said.

“Me too,” Deokmi said.

It felt so weird to have someone else put earrings in his ears. He didn’t like it. But he also didn’t want to be a dick to these girls, they were practically the only people who could stand him.

“It’s just a star,” Deokmi said. “Looks good, though. Maybe you can wish on it.”

Jongdae gazed at her, until she stuck her tongue out and laughed at him.

Weirder still was the day he was minding his own business, sitting at a table outside one of the academic buildings drilling Mandarin vocab, when Chanyeol sat down across from him.

Jongdae tried to remember whether they’d ever exchanged more than 20 words before.

“Uh, hi?”

Chanyeol sighed heavily and buried his face in his crossed arms on the table. Jongdae stared at him.

“Are you – okay?”

Chanyeol’s groan was muffled by his arms.

“I have this modern dance class,” he said, lifting his head but still sounding unclear, given how far his bottom lip was stuck out. “And I’m so bad at it that it gives me an existential crisis, so I couldn’t bear to be alone.”

“Oh,” Jongdae said.

He was so bad at comforting anybody, any time, but Chanyeol had this enormous, earnest-looking face and blinked his wide eyes so solemnly that Jongdae felt obligated to try.

“Why don’t you drop it?” Jongdae asked.

Chanyeol sighed again.

“I need the P.E. credit,” he said. “And also.”

If he kept sighing like that, he was going to make himself pass out.

“It’s the only time I ever get to see Jongin.”

Jongdae’s tongue tried to betray him – he could feel “oh yeah, I know him” threatening to rise up out of his throat, but he caught it in time and shoved it back down.

“Do you know him? Kim Jongin?”

Jongdae made what he hoped was a noncommittal noise.

“He’s so _beautiful_ ,” Chanyeol groaned. “He dances like it was the only thing he was created to do, it makes me feel like I have seven legs, and they all want to go in different directions. Ugh.”

His next sigh was less heavy and more besotted.

“But he’s so shy. He’s like a woodland creature, like I could scare him away if I so much as look at him too long – “

Chanyeol broke off and waved at someone behind Jongdae. Jongdae caught a whiff of patchouli and clove smoke, saw black out of the corner of his eye, and Haneul sat next to him, draped one arm over his shoulders.

“Hey,” she said. “You’re not being mean to our Jongdae, are you?”

What the hell.

Chanyeol raised both hands, palms out.

“Why would I be mean to Jongdae?” he said. “He’s sitting here listening to me blather about my romantic woes, without even once pointing out that they’re all my fault.”

“Okay,” Haneul said. “Just checking.”

“Hey, I know he’s your mascot, I have no interest in getting hexed,” Chanyeol said.

Haneul laughed, as if that made any kind of sense. She kissed Jongdae’s cheek while she stood.

“Smart man, Yeol,” she said, and patted his shoulder.

“I’m not anybody’s mascot,” Jongdae said when Haneul was far enough away not to hear.

Chanyeol waved his hand.

“Okay, familiar, whatever you want to call it. All I know is the campus coven has you under their wing, and it’s in the best interest of my dick not falling off to stay in your good graces.”

Coven? That’s what came of spending too much time with Baekhyun: his whimsy was contagious. You ended up doing stuff like believing in witches and true love and shit like that.

Chanyeol sighed again.

“Though I guess that’s the end of Baek’s dream that you’ll some day join us at lunch.”

Jongdae scowled.

“Why would I do that? Kyungsoo and Sehun hate me.”

When he was surprised, Chanyeol looked a little like a fish.

“Who told you that?”

“Dude, it’s obvious from the way they look at me, like they wish the ground would open up and swallow me straight to hell.”

Chanyeol scoffed.

“Oh, please. Like, _maybe_ Kyungsoo’s slightly pissed because Baekhyun wants you to sit with us and his whole life is divided in half between spoiling Baek rotten and smacking him in the head. But probably he looks at you like that because he can’t see you. Dude makes bats look like long-range snipers. And Sehun just has resting bitch face. He looks at everybody like that, it’s not personal. He’s actually a huge scaredy cat.”

Jongdae tried to digest this information. Granted, Chanyeol didn’t seem like the kind of person who’d fuck with him trying to trap him into a humiliating social experience. But all of that sounded so unlikely.

“Maybe I could invite Jongin to sit with us,” Chanyeol said, sounding morose again. “Do angels eat lunch?”

Jongin certainly ate vending-machine snacks with gusto. A proper cafeteria meal would probably do him good.

“I thought you were dating Baekhyun?” Jongdae said. “Or, uh. All, kind of. Dating each other.”

Because the way Baekyun had camped out the year before, to be first in line to choose their sophomore dorms so he could get one of the three quad rooms on campus, had been _very clear_.

“Ask not whether my dick shall getteth wet,” Baek had said, posing like Hamlet with a tangerine in lieu of a skull, “but ask ye whether my dick shall ever stayeth dry.”

Jongdae, as roommate being evicted in favor of their 24/7 orgy, had thrown a notebook at him. And then he had gone along to camp out too, which is why he had a single in the nice, quiet dorm at the top of the hill equidistant between the arts building and the gym.

“Ehhhh, dating is a little strong,” Chanyeol said, waving his hand. “I mean. Not that Soo didn’t rail me this morning until I cried. But you know. It’s like a friends with benefits thing. Like you and your witches. Though we all thought. I mean. Baek was kind of hoping you were gonna join our makeout pile at some point. Did you just decide dicks weren’t your thing?”

Jongdae choked on his soda, badly enough that Chanyeol had to leap up and thump on his back. By the time Jongdae was done coughing and crying, they both had to run to class, where Jongdae heard not one word about negative integers, with a brain too full of all the sheer bullshit Chanyeol had spouted at him.

It pissed him off, the more he thought about it. “Join the makeout pile”? For fuck’s sake. Baekhyun had practically disappeared for the first 2 weeks of school, emerging with a looseness to his spine and a neck more hickey than not to shrug at Jongdae and say shit like “don’t be jealous, be there.”

Oh.

Well, crap.

Chalk it up to yet another way he’d been a terrible asshole. Add it to the list of apologies he was going to have to figure out how to say some day.

In the meantime, he hung out with the witches – while feeling guilty that that was how he thought of them now. Even though he could kind of see it, with the way they all dripped with jewelry, and their rooms had multi-colored candles on every flat surface, obviously used despite open flames being outlawed in the dorms. He had to laugh at it, the night he’d been working on a history paper with Chaeyoung, and she said “oh geez, is that the time already?” when there was a knock at her door.

“Sorry to kick you out, sweetheart,” Haneul said, while – he counted – 11 other girls crowded into Chaeyoung’s room. “Girl stuff.”

Girl stuff. At night, among 12 girls dressed all in black. Yeah, he could kind of see Chanyeol’s point.

They passed him along in a line on his way out, each one of them hesitating a little before she leaned in to kiss him. Giving him a chance to pull back or say no.

So no, he considered, walking back to his own room in the dark, lips buzzing. Thinking about Baekhyun’s quad room, wondering how many boys were in it at the moment and what they might be doing to each other. Thinking about Minseok’s generous mouth. It wasn’t that he had decided that dicks weren’t his thing. It was just that he’d decided that not being pressured _was_ his thing. Being able to bow out when things got to be too much and not get hassled about it.

Jongdae chewed on that self-knowledge for a couple of days. He watched himself get dragged along by one or another of the girls to lunch. How readily he agreed when his voice teacher didn’t even ask whether he wanted to run lights for some mid-semester freshman orchestra thing. He just said “Jongdae, we need you on the light board on Thursday,” and he acquiesced, because it would be more of a hassle to say no.

So he was both an asshole and a pushover. It was just so great to learn about oneself!

The witches responded to his increased brooding by surrounding him any time he stuck his nose outside. By some weird coincidence or psychic power, he kept running into Chanyeol too, and he had taken to hugging. On one hand, Jongdae felt that he and Chanyeol weren’t nearly close enough for that level of physical contact, but on the other hand, the dude was a great hugger, even if his three hoodies each smelled like they were slightly overdue for the laundry hamper.

And, of course, it would’ve been a hassle to turn the hugs down.

So Jongdae found himself back in Chaeyoung’s room on a Friday night, assisting with party preparations. He had zipped three girls into small black dresses and pulled the strings of one corset into a configuration that he was certain couldn’t be comfortable. He tried really hard not to think about the fact that he’d seen/felt/etc. each of them in various states of undress, and repeatedly failed, so his ears felt hot.

“Here,” Deokmi said, handing him a choker and turning her back to him, holding her hair up so he could fasten it around her neck.

Over by the window, Joohee opened the window and pulled a clove out of her pack.

“Hold on, Joo,” Haneul said, “let’s see how this evening’s going to go first.”

“Come with us,” Deokmi said.

“Nah. I’m taking a break from partying.”

Haneul sat next to him on the bed and put her hand on his neck.

“We could stay in too,” she said. “Turn off all the lights, maybe. See which body parts ended up where.”

And for a minute, Jongdae could feel it in his mind – how easy it would be to fall into all that skin, all those mouths and breasts, feel their small, cool hands on his body. He could get lost in it, he knew, and let them take care of him. Do whatever it was they wanted him to, and not have to think about it anymore.

But hadn’t he been lost enough?

At that thought, he remembered the inscrutable look on Minseok’s face, staring at him those weeks ago. How Minseok had shut the door after him.

“Maybe not,” Haneul said, taking back her hand. “Ah well. Sure you won’t come out with us?”

“Sure, okay,” Jongdae said, with that shut door still hovering behind his eyes.

They put him through the process before they consented to be seen in public with him – his own jeans and jacket, but they dressed him in some shiny black shirt that hung down below his collarbones, fauxhawk gelled up high, eyes lined and something shimmery brushed across his cheeks. On the walk over to the party, one witch on each arm, he heard murmuring behind him that sounded like rock, paper, scissors.

They arrived at the party; he made sure they each had a cup in hand before he even scanned to see who else might be there, and found himself standing next to Kyungsoo.

“Oh, hey,” he said.

“Hey,” Kyungsoo said. “Baek’s in the other room dancing.”

Jongdae took that as the suggestion he suspected it was. Baek shrieked at him from the small space serving as a dance floor and reeled him in.

How long had it been? Not since last year, easy. Jongdae hadn’t realized how much he missed dancing with Baekhyun – the familiarity of it, how comfortably their bodies moved together. How Baek’s arm around his waist meant safety.

By the time they were both good and sweaty, Chanyeol had joined them – as advertised, a terrible dancer, but who the fuck cared, the way his hands wrapped more than halfway around Jongdae’s hips like that?

Did he really think that invitation to the makeout pile was still open? Because it suddenly seemed like an excellent fucking idea.

“Excuse me.”

A small hand went around his arm. Baekhyun scowled.

“I’m really sorry,” Joohee said. “I need Jongdae’s help.”

Chanyeol’s warm hands drew away from his hips.

“Do you now,” Baekhyun said.

“Yeah. I do.”

“It’s okay,” Jongdae said.

“Don’t go if you don’t want to,” Baekhyun said.

Jongdae looked at Joohee. She looked concerned, not panicked. He was so, so tempted to say no.

Who was he kidding. He knew he was a dickhead, but he wasn’t like an actual bad person.

“Of course I’ll help,” he said, squeezing Baekhyun’s waist before he let go. “I liked dancing with you, Baek.”

“Yeah,” Baekhyun said.

Joohee led him to the back of the house.

“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what Haneul was thinking, but she’s so, so drunk. She needs to not be here.”

Seriously? Like he was the only person to walk her home? For a couple of seconds, Jongdae let himself feel pissed, let himself entertain the idea of turning around to go back and squeeze himself between Baekhyun and Chanyeol and see where that took him.

But all those eyes were looking at him. And he wasn’t drunk enough to give in to the urge to be rude.

“Okay,” he said.

Haneul lurched at him, reeking of tequila. Jongdae prayed that whatever god was in charge of witches would make sure she didn’t barf on him.

He dragged her outside, where the cold seemed to wake her up enough that she sort-of walked under her own power.

“I’m sorry, Jongdae,” she slurred. “Gots to be done.”

“It’s all right.”

“I thought you’d be ours,” she said a few minutes later. “But I get it. You need your own thing.”

He didn’t even try to respond to that bit of drunken rambling.

“You just need to learn to see,” she said. “Stop looking in the mirror through a fucking shadow.”

“Okay,” he said.

“It’s not,” Haneul said. “But it will be.”

She danced out of his grasp, arms wide and head tipped back.

“Two paths diverge in a wood, Jongdae,” she said. “The thing is, you’re lucky. One path is always gonna be open to you. You can count on that path, baby, that’s a safe path for life.”

She stopped and pointed at him.

“But the second one. There’s a limited window of opportunity.”

He was impressed that anybody so trashed could pull out that kind of vocabulary.

“Strike while the iron’s hot, sweetheart. Because down that path is some fucking happiness.”

She staggered, and he caught her.

“You gotta get some fucking happiness, Jongdae.”

“All right.”

Haneul snorted.

“Don’t you all right me, you blind-ass moron. What do you think I’m doing here? I drew the short straw. God, I hate being this drunk, I hope you appreciate this.”

At the time, what he appreciated was that they had made it to her dorm. He dragged her upstairs, and she made not one move on him while he helped her get out of party clothes and into sleepwear, though she smirked a lot. She drank the glass of water he gave her.

“Get out of here,” she mumbled. “Go walk through that wood.”

 

There weren’t any trees of note between her dorm and his. And once he got there, he couldn’t settle. He had barely drunk anything, but his body was ramped up from dancing and possibility. He could probably go back to the party, pick up where they left off. See what happened.

Jongdae pictured what it would be like to trudge all the way back off campus and find that Baekhyun and his roommates had gone. Did he have it in him to go to their building and knock on the door, see whether they would have him?

With a 50% chance that it would be Kyungsoo or Sehun who answered the door.

He didn’t have that kind of balls. And he’d had just enough to drink that his voice would sound like shit.

Well, a workout was less fun than sex but just as likely to help him sleep.

Before he could talk himself out of it, Jongdae changed clothes, grabbed his stuff, and hoofed it to the gym. He was so used to having the place to himself that he was already kneeling, tape placed in his boom box, before he realized he wasn’t alone.

“Oh,” he said to the shins in front of him.

The muscular thighs. The slim midsection. Kim Minseok’s face.

“Hi.”

They stared at one another. Minseok had on a headband, like some old-ass tennis player. And he still looked amazing. That was unfair.

“You’re here to work out?”

Jongdae nodded.

“I usually. I brought music,” he said. “Is that okay? I don’t have to.”

“No,” Minseok said, still staring. “That’s fine. I don’t mind.”

Jongdae nodded.

“Party no fun?” Minseok asked.

“What?”

Minseok gestured toward his face. Embarrassment ran away with Jongdae’s mouth.

“Shit,” he said. “I forgot. I’m gonna look like a fucking raccoon while I work out. Unless I go blind from a mixture of eyeliner and sweat, which would probably be a blessing, so I don’t have to see how bad my skin breaks out.”

Minseok grinned.

Jongdae’s lungs forgot how to perform their basic functions.

“Or you could walk over to the locker room eight meters away and wash your face,” he said, still smiling like some beneficent creature from a higher fucking realm of existence.

“Or. That,” Jongdae said faintly (given his lack of oxygen). “I could. Do that.”

Face washed, Jongdae gripped the sink and stared himself down in the mirror until he internalized the basic fact that he would look even more like a dork if he scuttled back out to the gym, took his stuff, and ran away. That he was practically an adult and therefore capable of sharing a gym space with nearly anybody, no matter how unfairly gorgeous they might be.

Of course, just to test him further, when Jongdae reentered the gym, Minseok was sitting at the Nautilus machine, legs spread wide, glaring intently into the middle distance while he pulled a cable in each hand down from over his head. And he had taken his shirt off. The view was. Really something. Jongdae wasn’t even sure he possessed that many muscles, just on a basic biological level.

Jongdae wondered whether this was what it felt like to have been stuck in the desert for a week. He took advantage of bending down over his boom box to grit his teeth in frustration. Then he took a deep breath. Focus. Workout.

It wasn’t a great workout, because Jongdae wasn’t able to stop himself from looking over, and every time he did so, it seemed like Minseok was flexing, or wiping sweat off his neck with elegantly angled fingers, or stretching long. Jongdae counted himself lucky that he didn’t drop a hand weight onto his own foot even once.

Christ. Jongdae hadn’t known that it was possible for somebody to be so beautiful that they could make your ears ring.

Minseok’s workout coincidentally ended around the same time as Jongdae’s, and he walked over while Jongdae was packing up his stuff, rubbing a towel over his still-bare torso. Jongdae knew he was failing at his attempt to not stare, but he hoped he at least wasn’t being too rude about it.

“I liked that music,” Minseok said. “What was it? I thought you were into punk and stuff.”

One part of Jongdae’s brain died of surprise that Minseok knew anything about him at all, but thankfully his brain stem could talk about music on autopilot.

“I don’t like anything too loud or fast for working out,” he said. “Makes me push myself too hard, and then I’m too sore to move the next day. This is just an industrial mix I threw together.”

“Industrial?”

“You know, like punk run through a synthesizer with a dance beat added.”

Minseok smiled, and Jongdae forgot anything he ever knew about anything.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I pretty much just hum along to whatever’s on the radio. I might be able to identify, like, maybe a Pearl Jam song, if I absolutely had to.”

“Oh, well, industrial and grunge are both off-shoots of punk, right? Maybe the shared musical sensibility isn’t obvious at first, but they’re definitely related to each other.”

Jongdae stopped talking. He wished he’d stopped talking several sentences previously.

“You’ll have to tell me about that some time,” Minseok said.

Then the edges of his smile did a thing, and Jongdae was reminded of a nature show he saw once, and the look on a leopard’s face before it pounced on some small, furry creature.

“But maybe not when I’m half-dressed.”

“Okay,” Jongdae said.

Sadly, it came out more like a squeak.

Minseok slung his towel over one of those rounded, bare shoulders.

“I’m gonna hit the showers,” he said. “You?”

Jongdae could’ve laughed aloud. He pretty much didn’t trust himself anytime, ever, but especially not his dick, standing under hot water naked next to Kim Minseok.

“Nah, I’ll shower at the dorm.”

Whatever that look on Minseok’s face meant – or the way his eyes flicked down, then back up – it definitely couldn’t be disappointment. Jongdae told himself to get it together. He’d had such a weird night that it was obviously fucking with his mind.

All the songs that he would play to take a listener through from disco to glam rock to punk to industrial to goth to grunge were still tumbling through Jongdae’s mind when he woke up in the morning, so he hung around in his room, putting a mixtape together and doing his homework. One nice thing about this no-party lifestyle: his grades were great, and he was going to have all his research papers done before inevitably spending the end of the semester living in the theater’s tech booth with Jongin. Or with somebody else, if Jongin got a part in Yixing’s musical.

The mix needed a little tinkering still, but he was pleased with how it was coming along by the time he wandered into the cafeteria for a late dinner. He liked the emptiness of the cafeteria late on Saturday nights and happily hummed his way through his burger, thinking of how to make Minseok’s mixtape even better. He wanted to work some XTC in there, but it needed to be just the right song –

“No plans tonight?”

Jongdae looked up and into, inexplicably enough, Minseok’s face. Usually he counted it a good week to have a brief Minseok sighting more than once. Twice in less than 24 hours was unprecedented since their days both hanging out at the Delta Beta Sigma house, and who wanted to think about that?

Especially with Minseok standing there in black jeans faded in all the most suggestive places, with a tight red thermal and what looked like a brown bomber jacket tucked under his arm.

“Nah,” Jongdae said, trying for insouciance. “I’ve been taking a break from partying since – “

Shit.

Shit, _shit_.

Jongdae lost his appetite and set his burger down.

“Since?” Minseok said.

Which, okay, fair, Jongdae knew he deserved that, the whole thing was kind of gross, he should’ve been more careful. He laid his hands flat on the table.

“Look, man, I’m sorry, you shouldn’t have seen that,” he said. “But like. Don’t think badly about Joohee because of that, okay? She’s not like a – like a slut, or anything, she’s a really nice person. That’s all on me, I should’ve been more careful.”

Minseok pursed his lips.

“Do you want to grab a drink?”

“What?”

“I was on my way to the Rat,” Minseok said. “Come with.”

“You go to the Rat?”

The Rathskellar was the only bar actually on campus grounds, but it was so small and dingy that Jongdae literally knew nobody who went there.

Except that he was apparently about to, because he could feel his will collapsing in on itself like a neutron star in the face of Minseok’s swift grin.

“I like to drink, I hate crowds, but I feel like drinking alone is probably unhealthy,” Minseok said. “Ergo, the Rat.”

“I don’t have my fake ID with me.”

“Stop quibbling and come have a drink with me.”

The girl sitting on a stool outside the Rat leaned in for Minseok’s kiss to her cheek and stamped the back of both their hands without a single question. The place was dimly lit and furnished in the most beat-up, mismatched furniture Jongdae had ever seen, all in shades of brown. There was a jukebox in one corner, a Queen song playing. He and Minseok sat at the bar. Jongdae figured that if cider was good enough for Minseok, it’d be good enough for him – and, as it turned out, alcoholic apple soda was pretty tasty.

“Joohee _is_ a nice person,” Minseok said after staring for just long enough that Jongdae had started to squirm.

“You know her?”

“She lives in my dorm.”

Jongdae nodded.

“She actually apologized to me too, although she said she was the one who put you in a compromising position.”

Jongdae blinked at the scratched-up wood of the bar.

“All those girls are nice,” Minseok added. “Though I was pretty surprised that you took up with the murder of crows.”

“The what?”

Minseok laughed. Jongdae was so baffled by what could possibly be going on here, as Queen changed out for David Bowie and somebody yelled over by the dart board. But Minseok was laughing, and Jongdae wanted to touch him so bad it made his hands ache.

“That sounds mean, and I don’t mean it that way. They’re just funny, the way they walk around together in all those black clothes. But I like them, the ones I know. I was just surprised.”

He stopped laughing and leaned toward Jongdae a little.

“I mean, Joohee made it clear you’re not actually dating any of them. But I always thought if you were going to start a friends with benefits thing, it’d be with Baekhyun and Sehun and them.”

Jongdae was so glad he had set his glass down, or he definitely would’ve dropped it at that.

“How do you know about that?”

“Jongdae. Everybody knows about that,” Minseok says. “And even if Baekhyun and Chanyeol weren’t both the type to tell everybody everything all the time, I’m close with Sehun.”

“You are?”

“I tutor him in chem. And Yixing is very interested in Baekhyun on an ‘I’d like to get naked’ kind of level. So they’re a frequent topic of conversation in my dorm room.”

“Oh,” Jongdae said, unable to come up with anything better.

“So I get that you’re some kind of pet project for the crows,” Minseok says. “But it leaves me with a question. Are you bi, or was last year just, like, some kind of experimentation for you?”

“I’m, uh, bi, I guess,” Jongdae croaked.

Minseok nodded. He took a slow sip of his cider while Jongdae watched. When he turned back, the expression in his eyes was a little more intense, and Jongdae swallowed.

“I am not bi,” Minseok said. “I only like men.”

He looked away, with a little bit of smile hovering around his lips, and waved for the bartender.

“Shot of JD, please,” he said.

And then, when the full shot glass was placed in front of him,

“Not a lot of things I like the taste of better. Than JD.”

Jongdae only managed not to fall off his stool by a literal miracle. He could feel his ears burning, and he had to keep his hands on the bar so Minseok wouldn’t see them trembling.

He was positive that the little jog the shot glass took on its trip to Minseok’s mouth was on purpose – especially when Minseok grinned, stuck out his tongue, and licked up the side of the glass. He tipped it back into his mouth, swallowed with his head still tilted back so that Jongdae saw the bob of his throat. Set the glass down and sucked on the web of his hand, licked whisky off his thumb.

Jongdae was so hard that if he touched himself at that moment, he probably would’ve come in his pants.

“Delicious,” Minseok said.

Here was a thing he had wanted, and he could have it. They could walk out of here and up the hill, into Jongdae’s room, behind the door. And then he could kiss those wry lips, put his hands on the contours of that body, press their bare chests together, touch, and –

Who was he, to get a thing that he wanted?

Would it be like Baekhyun, all of them fucking each other silly like placeholders until they each found someone they really liked?

Would it be like the witches? An easy thing on easy days that just kind of happened?

Or a one-time hookup, like all the other one-time hookups he used to have, sucking each other dry but afterward barely nodding at each other in the cafeteria? Minseok’s come in him, a distant “thanks,” and that mixtape unfinished in his boom box.

“I gotta go,” he said.

The smile dropped off Minseok’s face, but Jongdae was comforted that confusion replaced it, not anger.

“You do?”

“I’m sorry. I just. I’m sorry.”

Minseok sighed down at his glass.

“I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do, Jongdae.”

“Don’t be pissed at me.”

“I’m not.”

Jongdae didn’t really believe that.

“Thanks for the drink,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t finish it.”

Minseok gave an unhappy little laugh.

“I’ll finish it,” he said. “Apparently I’ll be here a while.”

“Sorry,” Jongdae said again.

Of course, by the time he was back in his room, Jongdae was kicking himself up one side and down the other with regret. He growled at his stupid, empty bed that totally could’ve had a naked Minseok in it, if he weren’t such a stupid-ass, overthinking dickhead.

Christ.

What an idiot. Left with nothing but his right hand and a cascade of curses falling out of his mouth, coming onto a dirty t-shirt at the memory of Minseok’s tongue working that goddamn shot glass.

 

He was up early to the practice rooms the next morning. Jongin wasn’t there – the building echoed with its own quiet, which he tried to fill with his voice.

He ran into Deokmi outside the cafeteria, believed not at all that it was a coincidence, and let her rattle to him over breakfast.

“I think Haneul’s still hungover,” she laughed. “How was your weekend?”

“Confusing,” he said.

She laughed again.

“Life does go that way, baby. Your clouds’ll clear up soon.”

In the interest of improving his internal weather, Jongdae spent the afternoon in the library, which had a surprisingly good modern music collection and recording equipment students could use.

Because if he was going to fucking turn down the offer to fuck Minseok in favor of a fucking mixtape, the fucking mixtape he would fucking finish.

Tuesday morning, he finished copying the track list onto the tape insert in his tidiest handwriting (still pretty messy) and slipped it into the front pocket of his backpack. He hardly ever saw Minseok around campus, so he wanted to have it ready.

Chanyeol found him in the afternoon at what had become their usual outdoor table and sat next to instead of across from him, laying a heavy arm across his shoulders.

“Buddy,” he said. “Next time we get to dancing with my dick pressed up against your ass, I hope it ends up with both of us being naked, because oof, you are stupid fucking hot, you know?”

He was so earnest about it, and not even leaning in close to be suggestive or anything, that Jongdae laughed.

“Sorry I left you hanging,” he said. “I hope Baek took care of any issues that arose.”

“Whoa,” Chanyeol said. “Have I ever seen you laugh before? Who said you could do that? You’re not supposed to up the cute after I just told you that you’re cute, it’s fucking unfair, Jongdae.”

He got up and stomped off like he was in a huff, except that before he got too far away, he turned around and waved with a bright smile. Jongdae had to shake his head. It was kind of nice to know that at least half of the makeout pile would welcome him in, if he wanted.

He might even kind of want it, assuming that he’d fucked things up with Minseok entirely.

Tuesday evening, he went to check his mail for the first time in several weeks and turned a corner to see Minseok. He had on a pair of combat boots as battered as Jongdae’s own, a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off, what the fuck, and a flannel tied around his waist in a way that just made the whole shoulder-to-waist ratio thing bring to life some of the rhapsodizing Jongdae’s high-school math teacher had done about geometry.

He was sipping at a soda and reading a paper in his hand, leaned against the wall. Jongdae steeled himself and dug the cassette out of his backpack. He’d put hours into this fucking thing, he’d see it through.

“I, uh, made a mixtape,” he said, handing it out and not letting himself collapse under the sheer amount of surprise on Minseok’s face. “From what we were talking about at the gym on Friday.”

Minseok looked down at the tape in his hand, then back up at his face.

“Do you, um, maybe want to … listen to it?”

Minseok stood up from against the wall, looked back down at the tape, but still made no move to take it.

“I do,” he said. “Did you mean now? Your place sounds good, Yixing’s studying for a test.”

Oh.

“Sure?”

“Great, lead on.”

If Minseok felt as awkward as he did silently climbing the hill to Jongdae’s dorm, it certainly didn’t show. Jongdae kept trying to think of a question to ask or a comment to make, but everything seemed either snarky or dumb in his mind, so he just walked and chewed his bottom lip and tried not to die.

“I love this dorm,” Minseok said while Jongdae unlocked the door. “I mean, I like living with Yixing, he’s a pretty chill roommate, and he’s so busy that half the time I feel like I live in a single anyway. But man, if I could’ve gotten a room in this building. It’s so quiet and close to the gym.”

“Baekhyun and I camped out for room assignments,” Jongdae said. “Baek wanted to get a quad room. I just kind of went along for the ride, but being number two in the line, I had my pick.”

“How come you’re not in that quad room, too?”

What a fucking question. That Minseok asked it in a tone of voice with no sneer or suggestion in it, while they climbed the stairs to his room, made Jongdae figure he could have an answer.

“I didn’t know until very recently that I was invited,” he said.

Minseok laid one hand on the arm Jongdae was using to unlock his room.

“Jongdae. How could you think Baekhyun wouldn’t?”

Jongdae looked up into a surprisingly worried expression. He couldn’t think why Kim Minseok, who barely knew him, would be so concerned. He watched Minseok examine him, tilt his head to one side, and frown.

“Maybe that’s a conversation for another day,” he said. “If you were there, I wouldn’t be here now, with this mixtape to listen to.”

Jongdae shivered at Minseok’s low tone.

His room was not quite a disaster, but he saw Minseok’s small smile when Jongdae scurried around to gather up the small pile of clothes tossed around. He watched Minseok examine his bookshelves, set his backpack down next to the desk.

“Are you a music major?”

“Undeclared,” Jongdae said. “Music doesn’t seem really practical. But I do love it.”

They sat next to each other on the floor, Jongdae with his knees up and arms around them, while they listened to the mixtape.

In Jongdae’s opinion, it was a pretty masterful mixtape. Instead of moving linearly in time, as he narrowed down songs he’d arranged them for similarity, so that it went from Diana Ross to Bikini Kill, backward in time through Chic to XTC, forward to The Clash, back to Pink Floyd, forward to Nirvana, etc, 3 songs at a time for 90 minutes, ending with a progression he really loved from Thin Lizzy to Bowie to the Cure to VNV Nation.

It was really good. Good enough that as Minseok scooted closer, bit by bit, instead of freaking out, Jongdae could only grin and lean into him, anticipating the next song and those little huffs of surprise Minseok made, or – even better – the times when Minseok smacked his knee or drummed along on his leg.

“That was fucking amazing,” Minseok said when the tape clicked, then shut off. “We haven’t even talked about it, and I already feel like I know more about the history of pop music than I ever did before.”

Jongdae grinned.

“Thanks.”

“It’s for me? I can take it home and listen to it again?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Jongdae,” Minseok said. “Can I kiss you?”

He was riding on the high of a successful mixtape.

“Yeah,” he said.

Minseok straddled his thighs and placed cool hands under his jaw. Jongdae looked up into those warm, feline eyes and felt dizzy. But the touch of Minseok’s lips against his own brought him right back into his own skin. He’d imagined the two of them kissing rough and desperate, with lots of teeth, but Minseok’s lips moved soft and slow against his own. Jongdae felt Minseok’s fingers up under his ears, the heat of Minseok’s legs on his.

“I was afraid you’d taste like cloves,” Minseok murmured. “I hate those things.”

Minseok flicked his tongue; Jongdae opened his mouth, sighed, let Minseok in. Drove forward so their tongues moved together. His hands were twisted in the fabric of Minseok’s shirt. He tried to pull Minseok forward in his lap. Minseok sucked on his bottom lip, then sat back.

“Tell me what you want, Jongdae,” he said. “From you and me.”

Jongdae stared up at him and tried to place one thought next to another.

What did he want?

He wanted to kiss Minseok again. To take all their clothes off and see how good they could both feel. He wanted to sit together at the cafeteria, to hold hands in the quad, go to parties and drink too much and dance together and come back to this little narrow bed to fuck.

He wanted to be able to talk about “my college boyfriend” without feeling sick.

Or – maybe – he wanted to just never stop being college boyfriends until they were both little old men doddering around together in dumb-looking sweaters over an herb garden.

What the fuck did he want?

“What do you want?” he asked.

Minseok cupped his chin closer, leaned in and kissed him lingeringly. But when he sat up, he looked kind of sad.

“I’ll be happy to tell you what I want. But you have to tell me first.”

Jongdae tried to lean in for more kissing, but Minseok turned his head.

“Why?”

Minseok stroked his cheek with one thumb, then dropped his hands.

“I told you before,” he said. “I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do. I want you to want what you want, Jongdae. And to tell me what that is.”

“I want you to kiss me again.”

Minseok did – less gentle and more urgent, his hands on Jongdae’s shoulders. Not for nearly long enough.

“I’m going to take my mixtape,” he said when he broke away. “I’m really glad you made it for me. And when you figure out what you want, come tell me. Jongdae. I’ll be waiting.”

He left. He kissed Jongdae one more time, plucked the tape out of the boombox, and actually freaking left. Jongdae stared at the door until he fell asleep and woke up the next morning still in his same clothes, curled into a ball on the floor, stiff all over.

 

Maybe it should’ve been instructive that over the next few days, Jongdae could additionally not even tell what he was feeling, on top of what he wanted. Sadly, it was just confusing. He went to class. He sat at lunch with the witches, who were gentle with him and let him sit on the edge of the group, being gloomy at his sandwich while they talked about every topic under the sun.

“I’m siccing Baekhyun on you,” Chanyeol said after a silent sit-down at their table.

He was as good as his word: Baekhyun accosted Jongdae after dinner and stayed in his room that night, wrapped around Jongdae like a security blanket.

“Is it going to do any good to ask you whether you want to talk about it?”

Jongdae smiled into the safe darkness of Baekhyun’s chest.

“I’d talk if I knew what I was thinking.”

Baekhyun snorted.

“Sure you would.”

Jongdae leaned back and looked at him.

“I think this time I would,” he said.

Baekhyun combed his fingers through Jongdae’s hair.

“That seems like a good development,” he said. “Chan’s worried, but I’ve definitely seen you in worse shape.”

Jongdae snorted.

“It’s super weird to me that Chanyeol would worry about me.”

Baek looked kind of wistful, with his fingers on Jongdae’s cheek.

“He likes you a lot,” Baekhyun said. “I don’t know why you thought I didn’t mean for you to be part of my big sex plan. I don’t know why you thought you wouldn’t be welcome, Dae.”

“Idiocy, maybe,” Jongdae said. “It does make sense that I’d know you better than that by now.”

“Right?”

Jongdae poked his shoulderblade.

“Seriously, you say that, but you can’t pretend that Kyungsoo and Sehun aren’t wary about me, how was that supposed to go?”

Baekhyun groaned.

“They’re not wary, Jongdae, they’re both fucking shy, okay? I was kind of counting on you and your relentless ability to listen to people until they feel all deeply valued and shit to get us over the initial awkwardness of living together. But as it was, all we had to rely on was blowjobs and pot, and Kyungsoo won’t smoke, so it was pretty fucking tricky there for a little bit, thanks a lot.”

“My ability to? What?”

“You dumbass,” Baekhyun said, and gathered him close. “You never know any damn thing about yourself. Shut up and go to sleep, on the off chance you’ll be smarter in the morning.”

Wandering around campus the rest of the week, Jongdae wondered whether Baekhyun was right, and he was a stupid idiot where his own self was concerned.

Which didn’t make him feel great about being able to go to Minseok with an answer to that question, frankly.

Friday night found him in the arts building, watching Jongin dance and wondering whether he wasn’t the only one with a terrible case of emotional constipation.

“It’s nice of your to always feed me,” Jongin said while they sat leaned against the mirror in the dance studio, the contents of a vending machine strewn in front of them.

“Chanyeol any better at modern dance?” Jongdae asked by way of scientific experimentation.

Jongin’s cheeks flushed, and he became intensely interested in a loose thread at the ankle of his dance tights.

“Not really,” he said.

“He’s such a nice guy, though.”

Jongin nodded morosely.

“Yeah. I heard he has a thing going on with his roommate, though. Or maybe, more than one of his roommates? I’m not sure, it seems like there’s a whole crowd of them, but everybody seems really sure he has a thing going on.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jongdae said. “I’ve known his roommate Baekhyun since middle school. That thing they all have going on is totally casual.”

He watched Jongin very purposely not look at him.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Hey,” Haneul said to him the next day, pulling him in close and kissing his cheek. “Those shadows in front of your eyes are threatening to part, aren’t they? I’m proud of you, sweetheart.”

Inscrutable as that sounded, Jongdae hoped it was true.

It was a lot, though, crawling through his head. Wondering what it meant to want something. Jongdae hoped to see Minseok at his late-night Saturday gym session, but no luck. He woke up on Sunday caught up on homework, caught up on workouts, too early to sing decently, and not even hungry for breakfast. He was even too twitchy to just sit around listening to music, so he headed out for a walk.

Spring was definitely settling in – even early enough in the morning that the light had a gentle golden quality to it, it wasn’t unpleasantly cold. Jongdae meandered around campus, heading very vaguely toward the cafeteria, mostly just feeling his body move and watching how the light streamed through the pale green of new leaves.

At the base of one tree he saw colors that shouldn’t have been there – the vivid pink of raw meat and a bright, orangey yellow. He stepped forward, and there was movement, a high-pitched sound.

A baby bird, so young that its eyes were covered by membranes, its ugly, bony wings suggesting feathers only by a line of brown at the edges. He looked up but couldn’t see anything in the shadows of the tree it lay under.

What was he supposed to do?

The baby bird shuddered, as if it was cold. It opened its beak and made a weak cry.

For fuck’s sake, of course it was cold. It was nothing but bare skin, so tiny that he could’ve stepped on it and never even noticed.

Jongdae scooped up the bird. It weighed so little that he barely felt it in his hand. He was terrified to think that he might crush it, but he tried to hold it up against his shirt, feeling its feeble shifting and hearing that quiet cry.

There was a building nearby – one he hadn’t had any classes in. Jongdae rushed into it, and knew immediately from the acrid smell that it was a science building. He jogged down the hallway, looking into classrooms, hoping to find anyone who might know anything about what to _do_.

The fourth room he poked his head into was a study room, and Minseok was sitting at one of the tables.

Jongdae had a split second of “oh great,” and then it was pure relief that here was someone he know, someone who was smart and reliable, surely Minseok would know what was correct.

“Jongdae?” he said, rising from his chair.

“I found a bird,” he said. “Outside, on the ground. I don’t know what to do.”

And Minseok, being the good and mature person he had always been – hell, Jongdae knew this, even back in the days when they’d been at DBS house together, how could he have forgotten that? – didn’t let the weirdness between them make him hesitate before he came over and said,

“Let me see.”

Jongdae curled his hand away from his stomach. The baby bird cringed away from the light and burrowed down into his shirt.

“It’s so small,” Minseok said.

“It was under a tree,” Jongdae said. “But I couldn’t see a nest. Shit, should I not have picked it up? Won’t the parents reject it now, or something?”

Minseok squeezed his arm.

“No,” he said. “No, you’re fine. Birds have a terrible sense of smell, mostly. If we can find the nest, we can put it back.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, Jongdae. Wait here and keep it warm while I find a stepladder or something.”

Jongdae waited, still feeling the soft, jerky movements of the baby bird against his hand. Feeling how glad he was that of all people, Minseok was the one he’d found. Surely that was part of the answer to his question, right?

Minseok stuck his head through the doorway a few minutes later, and they trooped outside, one with a stepladder and one with a baby bird, back to the tree. Minseok looked up into the branches, set up the stepladder, and Jongdae braced it while he climbed and examined a branch, then jumped down and did it again.

“Here we go,” Minseok said. “It’s here. Let me get down and you can put our little friend back in his home.”

Minseok steadied him while Jongdae climbed up one-handed. The nest was easy to see from that angle. There were two other baby birds in it, and it smelled terrible – like rotting meat and ammonia. He lifted the bird and slid it gently into the nest with its siblings. All three of them cheeped, then shifted together, huddling close.

He climbed back down the stepladder with an ache in the center of his chest.

“It’ll be okay?”

“Should be,” Minseok said. “I have a couple classes in this building. I’ll keep an eye out. If our friend falls out again, I can ask around and find a wildlife rehabilitation person to raise it.”

The ache in his chest was so sharp, and it was so dark under the tree that Jongdae felt like he could hardly see. Wasn’t that a lot of effort, just for one baby bird? No matter how trembling and delicate it was.

“Would they do that?” Jongdae said. “Isn’t that just for, like, special animals? This is probably just some piece of shit sparrow or something, why would they bother?”

Minseok’s eyebrows drew together like he was furious.

“Because you help hurt things when you find them, Jongdae,” he snapped. “That’s what good people fucking do.”

Jongdae’s head snapped back. It was. Right? Like he had helped the baby bird.

Like he had been a hurt thing once, bare knees on a wood floor, making little cries like the bird had and shivering because he was cold. A person who was supposed to help him had hurt him, but there had been help anyway.

He hated thinking about it.

He hated how immediate that memory of cold was, how hard it was to catch his breath. How no matter how much he had tried, he couldn’t make himself small enough to disappear, so he had had to make himself tough enough to be left alone.

“Jongdae!” he heard dimly in the background. “Fuck, what’s wrong?”

He was wrong. All the walls he’d put up to keep people out hadn’t done anything but shut him in, and all he had was a best friend who could barely talk to him and a bunch of witches who would never give him a straight answer.

“Hey, dude, try to breathe, will you? I’m gonna call Baekhyun, okay? Just hang in there, please? Don’t pass out on me, Jongdae, please?”

There was a hand on his back, firm but not painful. Jongdae tried to focus on that hand, to make a still point in the typhoon that he had evidently decided to become. After a while, the hand moved, slow circles, and Jongdae tried to match his internal prevailing winds to the movement of the hand.

“Jesus,” he heard Baekhyun say a bit later. “Okay.”

Arms went around him, pulled him back until he was pressed against a chest. This drill. He knew this part. It had been a while, but he still knew it.

“Breathe with me,” Baekhyun said in his ear. “In and out, Dae. Slowly slowly. Come on, just like me, now.”

After a few minutes, the blood stopped roaring in Jongdae’s ears. He was breathing in concert with Baekhyun, leaned against his chest, Baek’s pointy chin dug into his shoulder. Jongdae looked up to see Minseok kneeling next to him, looking horrified, and Chanyeol standing a few feet away, pulling at the sleeves of his hoodie and red-eyed.

“Sorry,” he croaked.

“Fuck you,” Baekhyun said. “You don’t get to turn a panic attack into a form of self-torture. Tell Minseok thank you, we’re going home.”

“Thank you?” Jongdae said.

“Thank you without a question mark,” Baekhyun said, standing and hauling Jongdae upright. “He doesn’t have a mobile phone, but he will call you, or I’ll kill him. Later. After he feels better.”

Jongdae walked, one hand in Baekhyun’s death grip and one in Chanyeol’s much less painful grasp, not even realizing where they were going until Kyungsoo opened the door.

“What the fuck,” Kyungsoo said.

“Panic attack,” Baekhyun said.

Chanyeol draped himself over Kyungsoo.

“It was super scary.”

“Yeah, okay, you can be scared later,” Kyungsoo said. “Jongdae first. I’ll make tea.”

Jongdae felt too numb to think about the ramifications of the three mattresses shoved together in the middle of the floor (much less what he might be lying on). He was too grateful to not have to hold himself upright anymore, too grateful for Chanyeol’s being oversized and warm curled around him, and Baekhyun’s gentle fingers on his face.

Kyungsoo’s tea was the same black raspberry-honey tea Jongdae’s mom made for him when he had a cold as a kid. At the first sip, Jongdae broke out into tears and cried until he passed out.

He woke up to see Sehun’s face so close that he looked blurry.

“He’s awake.”

While Jongdae sat up, Sehun added, “Baekhyun had to go call somebody, and Chan’s changing his laundry over. They’ll be back in a second.”

Jongdae nodded. He looked behind him to see Kyungsoo sitting at a desk, a thick book lying open and face down.

“Sorry I cried all over your tea.”

Kyungsoo grinned, which Jongdae had never seen before, and it told him a lot about why Baekhyun had been so insistent that Soo join them in the quad room. It was a great smile, bright and shaped like a little heart.

“No problem, I figured it wasn’t personal. You were obviously standing on a cliff from the second you walked in here, it was going to be something. I made Chanyeol drink the tea as soon as he stopped clinging to you like a baby monkey, anyway.”

“Do you still need more hugging?” Sehun blurted, startling Jongdae. “I can, uh. Hug you. If you need it.”

“Thanks,” Jongdae said. “I’m okay. We don’t really know each other, that would be weird.”

Sehun nodded.

“Yeah. I mean, though, I kind of feel like I know you, from how much I hear about you from Baek and Channie and Minseok. So, you know. Offer stands.”

“Thank you.”

One thing about a sudden, violent emotional breakdown: Jongdae was too tired to even care about the profound awkwardness of the situation, much less to wonder what in the fucking world Minseok would’ve been saying about him to Sehun. Chanyeol arrived a few minutes later, smiling at the sight of Jongdae sitting upright and rushing over, only to drop his laundry basket on Jongdae’s leg and then knock Sehun over by diving in for a hug.

“Here, wear this,” Chanyeol said, pulling a hoodie (the purple one) out of his basket and sliding it over Jongdae’s head. “Nothing more comforting than clean clothes still warm out of the dryer.”

Jongdae elected not to point out that it still smelled pretty musty, because the gesture was really nice. Also, the hoodie was ludicrously large on him, which gave Sehun the giggles, and giggly Sehun was fucking adorable.

It had been a long time since Jongdae had allowed anybody to admit the reality that he was a small dude and do something like pull him into their lap. But he let Chanyeol do so – not because he wanted to avoid conflict, but because Chanyeol was his friend and it felt good.

“Wow, you are _nice_ when you’re snuggly,” Chanyeol said.

Sehun scooted up next to Chanyeol and put Jongdae’s shins across his lap.

“This isn’t as weird as hugging, right?”

Jongdae leaned his head against Chanyeol’s chest, hearing the deep, solid heartbeat there, and felt wistful for all the missed opportunities.

“It’s not,” he said. “It’s okay.”

 

Baekhyun got back not too much later, rude and bossy in a way that let Jongdae know that he was really freaked out and upsetting Chanyeol and Sehun, until Kyungsoo stepped in (and on Baekhyun’s foot) to point out what Baek was doing and squeeze him until he promised to stop.

“At least tell me you haven’t been having panic attacks like that all along and not telling me,” Baekhyun said.

“I promise.”

Baekhyun assessed him for a minute.

“Okay,” he said.

Jongdae spent the rest of the day in their room, playing a few rounds of cards but mostly just hanging out and chatting. Jongdae and Kyungsoo had the same history professor in separate class sections – they had a good laugh over her enthusiasm for the most gruesome stories possible and skirted around the idea of studying for tests together without ever actually making a plan to do so.

Chanyeol got going on the subject of Jongin and tried to hide from the jeering of his roommates by burrowing his face in Jongdae’s stomach. Jongdae petted his hair and laughed.

“Do you know this guy, Jongdae? He can’t possibly be as good-looking as Chanyeol says or he’d be a model or something,” Sehun said.

“God, if we were really mean, we’d hold Chanyeol down and pull out the _poetry_ ,” Kyungsoo said.

There was a high, muffled “no!” from the vicinity of Jongdae’s belly button.

“I do, actually,” he said, and let Chanyeol go to sit up and gape at him.

“He runs sound with me sometimes at the theater. And I can confirm that he is probably one of the best-looking people on the planet.”

“Unfair,” Sehun said.

“Aw, Hunnie, you know you’re the prettiest one here,” Baekhyun said, patting the (admittedly very handsome) face in question.

“One of the best-looking?” Chanyeol said, looking affronted. “Name me just one person more beautiful. You can’t do it!”

Jongdae could, but he wasn’t going to.

“Now that’s a blush if ever I saw one,” Kyungsoo said, and poked Jongdae with one toe.

Jongdae shook his head. But he could see Baekhyun’s sly little smile.

He went with them to the cafeteria for dinner, only to find all 12 of the witches waiting outside. It was rare to have a group of more than 6 at mealtimes. Jongdae felt a little like a chess piece, seeing how Baek and his roommates lined up in front of him, facing the crowd of black-clad girls.

“You’re not being mean to our Jongdae, are you?” Joohee asked, sounding casual.

“Why would I fucking be mean to Jongdae?” Baekhyun snapped. “We’ve been friends since we were thirteen years old, he is fucking precious to me.”

Jongdae jerked with surprise, and Sehun, of all people, put one arm around him.

“Okay,” Deokmi said. “Just making sure. Since he’s precious to us too, and all. Want to grab dinner?”

So that was weird. The crowd of them took up an entire table, with Jongdae in the middle while conversation flowed over and around him. Everybody shared classes or extracurriculars with at least a few of the witches, and they had a ton of friends in common. Jongdae caught Minseok’s name once and looked up to see Haneul and Baekhyun both grinning at him. Any time anybody got up to replace a dropped fork or get more food, they’d hug Jongdae on their way past – except for Kyungsoo, but Jongdae kind of suspected that it was because Soo could tell that all the affection was freaking him out a little.

“Damn, we’re going to need another project soon,” Joohee said after dinner, smoothing Jongdae’s hair off his forehead. “I’m going to miss you.”

“I don’t plan to go anywhere,” he said.

“I know, baby.”

“I ate too much,” Baekhyun said. “I need Dae to walk around with me so I don’t lose my admirable figure.”

Jongdae snorted.

“I’ve got a paper due,” Kyungsoo said. “Am I allowed to go work on it, or do you require my assistance with your fitness plan?”

“You may go,” Baekhyun said with a regal wave, and Kyungsoo grinned.

“I have chem tutoring,” Sehun said.

“Yes, you definitely have to go,” Baekhyun said. “Report all the pertinent details.”

It wasn’t until Baekhyun, Chanyeol, and Jongdae had settled into a slow amble across campus that Jongdae remembered who Sehun’s chem tutor was.

“So Minseok, huh?” Baekhyun said, as if he’d read Jongdae’s mind.

“Maybe?” Jongdae said. “I don’t know, I think maybe I fucked that up.”

Chanyeol took Jongdae’s hand, but Baekhyun shook his head.

“Unlikely, given how freaked out he was by your freakout.”

“That’s just because he’s a good person,” Jongdae said.

Baekhyun stopped and stared at him.

“He is a good person,” Baek said. “But please try not to be as stupid as you usually are.”

Jongdae smacked his arm.

“I thought I was precious to you, jerk.”

Baek touched his face lightly.

“You are. You always will be, no matter what.”

He leaned in and pressed his lips softly against the corner of Jongdae’s mouth.

“But you’re still a stupid asshole,” he whispered.

Jongdae yelled and chased Baekhyun around campus for a little bit. Jongdae worked out regularly, whereas Baekhyun’s major forms of exercise involved sex, so it went pretty badly for Baek, especially given how Jongdae had known him long enough to know where all his ticklish parts were. Chanyeol chased after them both, mostly laughing too hard to either help or hinder, until Baekhyun promised him several sexual favors, and Chanyeol lifted Jongdae into the air, holding him so tightly that the only thing Jongdae could’ve done to get free was kick him in the junk. Sadly, Jongdae liked Chanyeol too well to do that to him.

“Hey, this is my opportunity!” Chanyeol said, leaning in to kiss Jongdae almost as briefly as Baek had, if more forcefully.

Chanyeol’s goofy grin was so bright. And Jongdae realized that he was being held tightly, had been kissed without asking, and he didn’t even really mind. He leaned in and kissed Chanyeol again, laughed at Chanyeol’s surprise.

“Put me down, please.”

Chanyeol did.

“Did I ever tell you I’m glad we’re friends?”

Chanyeol shook his head.

“Well, I am.”

“Hey, no hugging without me, I’m the instigator of this friendship, I should get to be in the middle,” Baekhyun groused.

They walked until long past dark, holding hands or arms around waists, and Jongdae tried to remember the last time he’d been so relaxed, until he was successful at remembering, and that seized him up again. But only a little.

“What happened this morning?” Chanyeol asked. “I’ve never seen anything like that, I was seriously scared that you were going to like, die.”

Jongdae told them about the baby bird, and how fragile it had been. How it had shivered against his hand.

“But you saved it,” Chanyeol said. “Why did that upset you?”

Jongdae thought about how to say it and came up dry.

“All your shit from last year came roaring back,” Baekhyun said.

Jongdae nodded.

“You had shit go down last year?” Chanyeol asked.

At Jongdae’s hesitation, Baekhyun poked Chanyeol.

“He did, and it was really tough, and you don’t get to hear the details before I even do, so don’t pick at him.”

“Sorry,” Chanyeol said.

Jongdae reached for his hand and squeezed it.

“Oh fuck, you weren’t one of those DBS pledges, were you?”

“God dammit, Chanyeol,” Baek said.

“No,” Jongdae said. “It was – tangential to that.”

Chanyeol, being both very nice and very tactile, draped himself over and around Jongdae.

“Fuck, I’m sorry,” he said. “I heard those guys were total assholes. One of the pledges lived on my floor, and he just up and left school with no warning, it was terrible.”

“Thanks,” Jongdae said.

It was this huge, trembling pile of stuff in the pit of his stomach that Jongdae had resolutely refused to think about for so long that he was sincerely scared to even try, in case he took off running and just never stopped.

“It’s weird, though,” Chanyeol said when they’d started walking again, still holding Jongdae’s hand. “All we ever heard was how that house deserved to get broken up, but Max TAs my music theory class, and he seems like a really nice dude.”

“He is,” Jongdae said.

“Oh good, I’d hate to have been liking a creep all this time,” Chanyeol said.

Baekhyun’s arm around his waist while they walked helped Jongdae fend off any desire to cry again, or smack his head into trees, or anything else similarly melodramatic.

“Come sleep in our room tonight,” Baekhyun said.

Jongdae tried to picture how that might go.

“No funny business, just sleeping.”

“Aw,” Chanyeol said, and then “ow!” when Baekhyun hit him.

“I’m gonna worry about you otherwise,” Baek said. “And the problem now is that Chan and Soo and Sehun are gonna worry too, and we can’t all fit in your little doll bed.”

“I have nightmares when I worry,” Chanyeol said, wide-eyed in an endearing but totally fake way. “I might even cry.”

“Okay, but I need Kyungsoo to safeguard my virtue,” Jongdae laughed. “I don’t trust the rest of you assholes.”

Chanyeol shrieked with laughter.

“That just shows how little you know Soo, if you think _he’s_ the safe one,” Baekhyun said.

But it was nice. Kyungsoo smiled at him when Jongdae followed Chanyeol inside. They were sitting around drinking tea and watching a movie on Chanyeol’s portable DVD player when Sehun dragged back in.

“Oh good, you’re here, I was gonna worry about you,” he said.

Jongdae could only shake his head at every unlikely thing that had been going on lately. But he was comfortable, and he had laughed more than he had in a year.

“Fuck,” he blurted out. “Baekhyun, I _missed_ you.”

Baekhyun didn’t get misty very often, but he dove in toward Jongdae’s neck with wet eyes, and that made Chanyeol damp and clingy, and Sehun was clingy without the dampness, while Kyungsoo smiled at him as he patted Baekhyun’s shoulder.

“Why are we upset, and why did Jongdae miss Baekhyun?” Sehun asked when they all sat up, making Jongdae laugh helplessly.

“Jongdae’s in recovery from sadness,” Chanyeol said. “We have to treat him very tenderly.”

“Okay,” Sehun said.

Sleeping with them all was surprisingly easy and unsurprisingly hot, temperature-wise. Nobody tried to start anything, even though Baekhyun hadn’t said anything about the no-sex thing to Sehun and Kyungsoo. There was a round of goodnight kisses. Jongdae watched with interest all the different ways they kissed each other, and how sweet they all were with Sehun. He kissed Baek and Chanyeol, but he and Kyungsoo just smiled a little awkwardly at each other before a brief hug.

“I want to kiss you here,” Sehun said, touching Jongdae’s cheek. “Is that okay?”

“Yeah,” Jongdae said, agreeing internally with Baekhyun’s coo.

He woke up sweaty and squished to a soft alarm and the sight of Soo rolling up off the mattresses, hair mussed and his eyes looking unfocused. Jongdae slid out from under the pile, and they walked out together, Kyungsoo carrying his shower caddy.

“I’m glad you stayed over,” Kyungsoo said around a yawn. “Yesterday seemed like a lot for you, I think we all would’ve worried.”

“Thank you,” Jongdae said. “I know we don’t really know each other. You’ve been really kind.”

Soo smiled at him.

“We’ve got time to know each other better. You’ll come back again, right? It doesn’t have to be more than hanging out, unless you want it. But three of the people I like best all like you, I want the chance to do so too.”

“Yeah,” Jongdae said. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

 

The way the past few days had been going, and given everything he knew about Baekhyun’s busybodyness, Jongdae wasn’t surprised to walk out of his last morning class and find Joonmyun leaning against the wall outside the door.

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” Joonmyun said. “How do you feel about going off-campus for lunch?”

Joon kept the conversation light while they walked to his car and drove to the little diner that provided students with spending money and transportation relief from cafeteria food. Jongdae had had a lot of meals here with Joonmyun the previous year. At some of them, he had even eaten a little food. At present, he was happy to order one of their excellent chicken sandwiches, with plans to stuff the whole thing in his face at a high rate of speed.

“I guess Baekhyun called you,” Jongdae said once the waitress had taken their menus away.

Joonmyun nodded.

“How are you feeling today?”

“Better, actually. I let Baek and his roommates spoil me rotten for the day.”

Joonmyun grimaced.

“If that means a sex thing, please spare me the details.”

Jongdae laughed.

“It doesn’t,” he said. “But god damn, is there anybody on campus who doesn’t know about that?”

Joon grinned.

“Doubtful, the way Chanyeol spent the first month of school announcing to anybody who would listen that he was having sex and he really liked it.”

Jongdae had been hiding in his room from that very thing at the time, but he was glad to finally be able to smile at it.

“He’s cute.”

“He is,” Joonmyun said. “Though on a personal level, I’ll be thrilled if my subtle efforts to convince Sehun about the benefits of adding romance to one’s sex life come to fruition.”

Jongdae just barely avoided spraying soda out his nose.

“Does Sehun … understand subtlety?” he asked once he stopped coughing.

“I’m starting to think not,” Joonmyun groused.

Their food arrived, and Joonmyun talked about classes and stuff while they ate, which was considerate of Jongdae’s appetite.

“I want to apologize,” Joonmyun said when they were both picking at their remaining fries. “I’ve barely kept in touch with you this year, and it didn’t occur to me until Baekhyun called yesterday that you might hesitate to reach out.”

It had never occurred to Jongdae once to seek out Joonmyun. So he felt a little bad too.

“I’ve been mostly okay,” he said.

Joonmyun nodded.

“Yeah, that’s what Minseok kept telling me.”

Uh. What?

“You know Minseok?”

Joon frowned.

“I’m student body president, I know everybody,” he said. “But you know this, Jongdae. I know Minseok well. He’s the one who reported everything last year.”

If in fact Jongdae had ever known that, he had made himself forget it.  He knew Minseok had dated Max, and they had seen each other at DBS house all the time, but they hadn’t really talked to each other.

“You didn’t know that?” Joonmyun said.

Jongdae shook his head.

“I’m sorry. I think I wasn’t great with you about the details of all of that. You were so upset by all of it, I didn’t want to make things worse. It was bad enough trying to get statements from you and the pledges, I tried to keep you guys out of the disciplinary process as much as I could.”

Jongdae sighed and put his fry back on the plate.

“Jesus, I never even thought about those guys at the time. Do I, like, need to apologize to them, do you think?”

Joonmyun scowled at him.

“Apologize? For what?”

“They lost their frat house because of me, Joonmyun, they can’t be okay with that. All those guys who lived there. It was the most popular party house, and it’s my fault that it’s gone.”

Joonmyun bared his teeth briefly, then took a long, slow inhale and an even longer, slower exhale. He laid one hand flat against the tabletop.

“Giving someone drugs without their knowledge is assault, Jongdae. That’s why they lost their fucking frat house.”

Jongdae didn’t know what made him shiver more – the sharp edge of a memory he didn’t want or the fact that Kim Joonmyun cursed at him.

“What happened to you was bad enough, but a couple of those pledges. Jongdae, it was bad what Jaejoong and those guys did to them. And all of that is against University rules. So of course they got expelled. But hell, we didn’t even ask for the entire frat to lose its charter. Max and Yunho did that. They went to the chapter house with our report and had the national organization dismantle it. That wasn’t you. That was them. Because they felt like there was no coming back from what happened.”

Jongdae could remember so vividly how small and young he had felt, shivering in a chair in front of serious gazes, testifying about what little he remembered. Signing his name to a printout.

At the time, he had assumed that the seriousness of those faces was because they were angry with him, for being so much trouble, for being so colossally stupid that a hallowed school institution got fucked over permanently. All summer back at home, standing in his stupid paper cap behind the counter at the ice cream shop, he had thought about how furious everyone had to be with him, that he couldn’t handle one popular boyfriend, one party, one messed-up night, because he was too fucking _sensitive_ or whatever. And the only solution to that problem was to make sure he wasn’t sensitive at all.

“You thought it was your fault?” Joonmyun asked gently.

Jongdae nodded.

“Then I seriously need to apologize to you, Jongdae, because no. The people at fault are the ones who were politely invited to fuck off this campus permanently and complete their education elsewhere.”

Jongdae nodded. He turned that over in his mind the whole drive back and nodded again when Joonmyun patted his shoulder before he got out of the car.

Haneul passed by as Jongdae was entering his history classroom. She winked at him and gave him a thumbs up.

After class was over, a guy he didn’t know walked up to him.

“You’re Jongdae, right? Minseok asked me to tell you that the baby bird’s okay. Whatever that means.”

 

Jongdae kept hearing that over the next day and a half: everywhere he went on campus, there was somebody – sometimes a person he knew, but not always – dashing up to him to report that the baby bird hadn’t fallen back out of its nest.

Tuesday morning, after breakfast, while he walked toward the library, it was Yixing.

“Hey, my roommate is extremely concerned that you should know about some baby bird,” he said. “I assume that’s a code for something?”

“It’s not, actually,” Jongdae said.

Yixing gazed at him, then nodded.

“While you’re here, I should apologize,” Jongdae said. “I was really rude, and I’m sorry.”

Yixing tilted his head.

“You were? When?”

Jongdae had to take a minute.

“When you were – asleep on the floor in the arts building?”

Yixing laughed.

“Wasn’t that almost two months ago? Jeez, Jongdae, I barely even remember that, why would you think I was mad?”

“Uh. Because it was really mean?”

“Oh for pity’s sake, Jongdae, everybody could tell you were going through some kind of thing, nobody blames you for being grumpy. Besides, you woke me up just in time to get to my next class, it turned out to be a good thing.”

He leaned in.

“But since I have you here, can I ask you two favors?”

Confusion and relief inspired Jongdae to nod.

“First off, please talk Jongin into auditioning for my musical, I need him. And second, please tell Baekhyun I said hi, but make it sound, like, romantic.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Yixing nodded and walked away, but before Jongdae had even gathered himself sufficiently to unfreeze from his surprise, Yixing was back.

“The bird’s not a metaphor for anything? It’s a real bird?”

Jongdae nodded. He watched Yixing stare off into the distance, mouth moving like he was talking to himself.

“What rhymes with bird?”

“Word. Heard. Lured, furred, blurred, cured,” and, thematically consistent with the way Yixing was scribbling all these onto his hand, “absurd.”

“Thanks,” Yixing said. “If I use this I’ll have to give you a songwriting credit!”

It was a hell of a day.

He ate dinner with the quad squad and most of the witches. It was hilarious how Baekhyun blushed and wriggled at the news of Yixing’s greeting, and how Sehun went wide-eyed and still at the news of Jongdae’s lunch companion the day before.

Jongdae was ready to spend the evening snuggling in the quad room, but he emerged from under Chanyeol’s arm when he saw Max lounging against a tree outside the cafeteria.

“Minseok asked me to tell you that the baby bird is fine,” he said with a grin.

“So I’ve heard,” Jongdae said. “About twenty times.”

Max nodded.

“It seemed really important, or he wouldn’t care to talk to me.”

He put his hands in his pockets and shuffled his feet a little.

“I never really said I was sorry. For what happened to you.”

“It’s okay,” Jongdae said.

Max looked at him.

“Not really,” he said. “But nice of you to say so. And for what it’s worth, I _am_ sorry.”

Jongdae nodded.

“I wish.”

Max took a deep breath and looked Jongdae in the eye.

“Minseok is a really good person, Jongdae. He is a fundamentally honorable and decent guy, and I wish he had inspired me to be so earlier, so you and those other kids didn’t have bad shit happen to you. You know if he says that bird’s okay, the bird’s okay.”

“Yeah,” Jongdae said around the gravel in his throat.

Max put his hand on Jongdae’s shoulder, and Jongdae didn’t even flinch.

“Anything Minseok says will be okay is gonna be just fine,” Max said.

Jongdae stared after him until Max’s silhouette disappeared into the darkness, turning over in his mind all the messages he had gotten, and not just about the bird. He thought about all the different varieties of the word “okay.” Some of them were definitely better than others. He was thinking that his standards might have gotten a little higher recently.

He turned to go, and staggered, seeing how the sidewalk split.

Two roads, diverging.

One of them led to Baekhyun’s dorm, where he knew that however many people were there, he’d be welcome. Maybe even find a mouth to kiss or a cuddle. Maybe just a study partner, but that was okay too. And it would be waiting for him, whatever happened.

The other road was less sure, but he wanted to know what lay at the end of it. Jongdae turned up the collar of his denim jacket and headed toward the Rat.

 

The guy at the door stamped his hand without even really looking at him. Minseok was at the bar, hunched over a mostly-full glass of cider. His surprise, when he looked up, had something else in it that Jongdae couldn’t read. A little sadness, maybe. Maybe the hope he saw there was Jongdae projecting.

“I got your message,” Jongdae said. “A lot.”

Minseok’s cheeks went pink, and his smile was kind of shy.

“I told everybody I know,” he said. “I thought it was really important that you knew. I checked yesterday and today both. He’s still safe at home.”

“Anybody would be, I think,” Jongdae said. “With you looking out for him.”

Something moved across Minseok’s face that looked like pain or shame, but his eyes were wide when he looked back up.

“Can we get out of here?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

The door to Jongdae’s room had barely shut before his back was pressed against it, Minseok kissing him the way he had imagined, fierce and hot. It had been so long since he kissed anybody sober whose mouth had so much power to undo him. He clutched at Minseok’s shirt, couldn’t pull him close enough. Felt Minseok hard against his thigh.

“Fuck, I _want_ you,” Minseok groaned, moving his lips over Jongdae’s neck. “Jongdae. God. I want you.”

Minseok ground their hips together, and Jongdae gasped. He could feel Minseok’s tongue on his neck, could feel his heart beating as fast as that baby bird’s had. All those people coming to him, Yixing and – and Joonmyun. And Max.

“How could you?” he said, the sound coming high and sad out of his throat. “How could you want me when I’m?”

Minseok stopped. He didn’t pull away or take his hands off Jongdae’s shoulders. His face was flushed, lips red and shiny, and Jongdae couldn’t recall ever seeing anything so beautiful.

“When you’re what?” he asked in a soft voice.

What was he? Broken? Defiled? Jongdae hadn’t ever tried to put a name to it, to the ugly thing that crawled through him and made him brittle and mean. That made people hate him. Except that – apparently they didn’t.

“Ruined?” he whispered.

Minseok’s dark eyes held so much sympathy in them, and his hand was gentle on Jongdae’s face.

“What do you think happened to you that night, sweetheart?”

Jongdae could feel his breath starting to leave him again, and his bottom lip trembled while a rush of tears cascaded down his face. There wasn’t anything more terrifying than that yawning void of not-memory.

“I don’t remember.”

Minseok gathered him close, held him inside a firm embrace until Jongdae stopped shaking.

“I was there, and I remember everything,” Minseok said. “What do you want to know?”

Shock made a whole new rush of upset. Round two didn’t last very long, though, so soon they were huddled together on Jongdae’s bed, and Jongdae had no idea how to start. Minseok nodded.

“Jongdae,” he said. “Even if they’d held you down and taken turns at you, that wouldn’t make you _ruined_. You get that, right? When someone does bad stuff to you, they’re the ones at fault. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Jongdae was on the verge of screaming before Minseok shook his head.

“Sorry! Sorry, that was a terrible analogy. That’s not what happened. Jesus. God, what a time to put my foot in it.”

He put his hands on Jongdae’s shoulders.

“In my worst nightmares, that’s where it was going to go. But it didn’t, okay? Not to you. Jaejoong barely touched you.”

Minseok’s mouth twisted into something ugly.

“He was too busy laughing.”

And that part – imagining Jaejoong on the floor, howling at Jongdae’s distress, made it believable that what Minseok said was true.

“How did I get naked?”

“You did that yourself,” Minseok said. “You said you felt too hot. That’s what Jaejoong thought was so funny, that you just stripped down in the middle of the common room, yelling about how hot you were.”

Jongdae swallowed the sick feeling that rose up. He didn’t remember that at all. Just being at the frat house, sitting on Jaejoong’s knee, drinking something overly sweet from the cup Jaejoong had given him, and then only one other thing until he found himself crying into a pile of vomit on the floor.

He didn’t want to say it, but he figured it was time to know.

“I remember – fingers,” he said. “In my mouth.”

Minseok sighed and looked miserable.

“That was me,” he said.

Jongdae could only stare at him. Minseok rubbed at his hair.

“I couldn’t believe all the brothers were just standing around watching that shit. Letting Jaejoong laugh at you. God, it was so ugly, Jongdae. I kept thinking, you and me, we were just kids, we were freshmen, why did they think it was okay? And then you went stiff, with your eyes rolling back in your head, fuck, I thought you were having a seizure. I had no idea what he gave you, but I knew I couldn’t just continue to sit there and watch you fucking _die_. So I. Uh. Stuck my fingers down your throat so you’d throw it up.”

Jongdae looked down at those fingers, currently entwined with his, and back up at Minseok’s face, where distress was being quickly overtaken by fury.

“And then Jaejoong called me a cunt for ruining his fun, and I tried to kill him, and Yunho had to pick me up and literally drag my screaming ass out of the building and back to my dorm. Max came by later and said he’d ‘taken care of you,’ and when I found out that that did not include taking you to the goddamn hospital, I punched him in the face and broke up with him.”

“He picked me up,” Jongdae said. “Took me into the shower and cleaned me up. Gave me a track suit to wear home.”

“I wondered why he didn’t give me back that track suit with my other stuff,” Minseok said, voice softer and a little wry.

“I still have it, if you want it back,” Jongdae said.

“No, Dae.”

“Fuck, what an idiot,” Minseok continued after a minute. “How the hell did he think it was okay to fucking shower with you, when you didn’t even know if you’d been sexually assaulted?”

“I was too out of it at the time to care,” Jongdae said.

It had bothered him plenty afterward, after he woke up strangely sore from head to toe, bleary and thirsty, in unfamiliar clothes, with flashes of the before and after coming to him only gradually. Baekhyun had lost his shit coming home that night and finding Jongdae in hysterics. Baekhyun had been the one who got Joonmyun involved, bringing him to their room and glaring until Jongdae agreed to say what little he remembered. That whole, awful time of sitting in administrative offices telling the same disjointed story over and over, meanwhile going to classes and hearing people mutter dark rumors about the University “gunning for” DBS house. Feeling terrified, and like an idiot for dating a creep, and resentful of Jaejoong for being a creep, of all those administrators for making him talk to them and the University counselor, of Baekhyun for not letting him roll up in his blankets to just forget the whole thing ever happened.

And then DBS house disappeared, Jaejoong and several of his frat brothers with it, and the remaining members of the pledge class walking around like they were made of glass, always alone because people treated them as if they had a disease. Knowing he’d get the same if anybody knew.

“Max said you made him be a better person,” he said. “When he told me about the bird.”

“Did he?” Minseok said. “I figured it was just a ploy to get back together with me, but I’m glad that’s how he looks at it.”

Jongdae tried to imagine how much confidence it must take to make that assumption and had to grin, because it was worthy of Baekhyun.

“Jesus, you don’t know how relieved I am to see that smile,” Minseok said.

He shifted around until Jongdae was leaning against his chest. Jongdae was happy to snuggle in and lean against him.

“When Joonmyun pulled me out of class to give a statement, I had a fucking lot to _say_. I was so furious, but I also didn’t want to overstep. I was really happy that you went to him.”

“I didn’t,” Jongdae said. “Baekhyun made me talk to him. He’s happy to overstep.”

Minseok snorted.

“Good. I was the one who told Joonie to talk to the pledges, too. I figured there was no way that somebody who’d roofie his own fucking boyfriend would hesitate to do the same thing to people he had power over. And none of them wanted to talk, so Joonmyun asked me to go with him, hoping that a familiar face would help. Once one of them talked, the gates just opened. Shit, those guys. I’ll tell you those stories if you want to hear them, Jongdae, but believe me when I tell you how grateful I am that you were spared that shit. Jaejoong and his crew were such bad news. I was so afraid all that stuff would get stuffed under the rug.”

Jongdae remembered the few times he’d seen Jaejoong around campus after that night – first the smirks, then the glares, the hand-written threats in his mailbox – and shivered.

“Joonmyun said Max and Yunho were the ones who went to the national chapter and had the house dissolved.”

“Yeah,” Minseok said. “I was pretty surprised about that. Gave me hope for them as human beings. And once that happened, those guys were on a direct path to expulsion, thank God.”

“I didn’t know about the pledges. Joonmyun just told me the other day. I thought I was the only one.”

Jongdae felt Minseok shift under him, and the arms around him tightened.

“Are you serious? All those administration people let you think you were alone?”

Jongdae nodded.

“Motherfuckers. And I never even manned up enough to tell you what actually happened. Jesus, I’m sorry, Jongdae, you have really been through it.”

Jongdae sat on that for a minute: how scared he had been, how much he had hated himself. How much he had tried to wall himself off, and been unsuccessful.

It was bad, that he had been drugged and humiliated. But better than what he’d been afraid of. He could be honestly, simply relieved about that. And this person he’d longed for and felt unworthy of was holding him in his own bed, having looked out for him all along.

Jongdae touched Joohee’s hamsa, hanging around his neck where it had been ever since she gave it to him. Did she give him protection, or just the ability to see it?

“I’m sorry I brought this all back up for you from snapping at you the other day.”

Jongdae sat up and swiveled so he could see Minseok’s face.

“I’m not,” he said. “I’ve had several enlightening conversations. And it helps, to know what did and didn’t happen.”

“I’m glad.”

They had a long, awkward moment, where Minseok played with the seam of his jeans and Jongdae watched a dark flush creep up the side of his neck.

“Thanks for calling Baekhyun,” he said. “They took really good care of me. Him and his roommates.”

Minseok turned wholly red at that, and looked up with a wry expression. The disappointment Jongdae was looking for was also present.

“Is that what we’re calling it?”

“Tea, card games, and a good night’s sleep with lots of hugging? Yeah, that’s what we’re calling it,” Jongdae said.

“Oh,” Minseok said. “I assumed.”

“Obviously. And if it weren’t for some extenuating circumstances, I probably would’ve taken them up on that.”

Minseok smiled slowly and leaned in.

“Extenuating circumstances, huh?”

“Present company included.”

Minseok put a hand on the back of his neck and leaned him slowly onto his back while they kissed – softer this time, a little hesitant, like he’d found Jongdae under a tree and didn’t want to crush him.

Jongdae solved that the minute his back hit the mattress, by wrapping his legs around Minseok’s waist and opening his mouth wide.

“Fuck,” Minseok said a few minutes later, kissing down Jongdae’s bare chest until Jongdae squirmed with want. “Do you have any idea long I’ve wanted to get my hands on you? Every party I saw you at, I’d get cockblocked by one of those damn girls. It’s a wonder I didn’t set any of them on fire from glaring so hard.”

Jongdae ruined the moment by shouting with laughter.

“I thought you were glaring at me!”

Minseok lifted his head and stared, and then the two of them laughed, chests pressed together and legs tangled, until Jongdae’s belly ached.

“Jesus,” Minseok said, and kissed him. “What a mess, thank God you came to the gym that night or who knows how long it would’ve taken us to get here.”

“Nah, you have to thank the girls for that one, too. Haneul got so drunk that they pulled me straight off the dance floor and made me walk her home.”

“That sounds like a setup,” Minseok said. “Except I have no idea how they’d know I was at the gym.”

Jongdae had no idea either, but he figured it was probably true.

“You, though, are one crazy-making little asshole,” Minseok added, rotating his hips in a delightful manner. “I brought out every fucking cliché in the book and practically drew you a diagram of how I wanted to suck your dick in the gym shower, and you left me!”

“Oh no, I’m not coy, I’m just stupid,” Jongdae said.

He pulled Minseok down for more kissing, with solid plans to put a lot of thought to the mental image of Minseok on his knees in the shower. Though if he played it right, maybe he wouldn’t have to imagine that.

“I’ll grant that you’re oblivious, but I was so obvious in the bar that three separate people called me on it, you can’t have missed that,” Minseok said while Jongdae nibbled at his collarbone.

“I might have a few issues with aggression,” Jongdae murmured, then sucked at the skin in front of him before Minseok could do anything unwelcome like pull away.

“Yeah, I figured that part out.”

Minseok pushed Jongdae’s head back until they looked at each other.

“I took that mixtape to be an act of bravery.”

“It was,” Jongdae said. “And can we please table the rest of our emotional conversation until after we get off?”

Minseok grinned, and in short order, Jongdae got to see the full glory of that trim, muscled body and the very evident enthusiasm that he had inspired.

“God, you are so hot,” Minseok said. “I love what you have going on here with these fucking thighs, Jesus.”

He bit the left one, for emphasis.

“I’ll show you what I can do with them some other time, today I want you in me.”

“No way,” Minseok said.

Jongdae froze and stared at him, but Minseok leaned up to kiss him softly until he relented.

“Jongdae. When’s the last time you had sex sober?”

“Uh.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. I’m in this for mutually mind-bending experiences, not freakouts, okay? Let’s take this slow, I’m not going anywhere.”

Jongdae touched his face.

“You asked me what I want. That’s it,” he said. “For you to not go anywhere.”

If Jongdae still had any of those shadows still in front of his eyes, Minseok’s smile drove them away.

“Then this is where I’ll stay,” he said. “And in the meantime, it seems to me that I saw a demonstration once of the kinds of things you can do with that mouth.”

Jongdae grinned wide.

“I’ll be happy to show you.”

 

Jongdae was never so happy to have his bladder crushed by a knee as he was the next morning when he woke up to discover that none of it had been a dream, that the post-crying headache was from their whole reveal-and-confession episode, and the gross taste in his mouth was from swallowing Minseok’s come. Twice.

Given that it was a shared dorm shower, they tried to be good and only failed a little bit via a swift mutual handjob. They were close enough in size that Minseok was wearing Jongdae’s clothes when they walked hand in hand to breakfast.

“I think I have classes today,” Jongdae said. “What day is it? Do I even care?”

Minseok smiled, pulled him behind a tree, and kissed him.

There were witches waiting for them at breakfast, of course.

“I’m taking this back,” Deokmi said, pulling her earring out of his ear. “You don’t need it anymore.”

“Me too,” Chaeyoung said. “Make your boyfriend buy you earrings.”

“I can buy my own earrings,” Jongdae said.

“That you can,” Joohee said, and kissed his cheek. “The necklace is yours.”

“We’ll leave you guys to yourselves, see you later,” Haneul said.

“If I think about them too much, I’m going to get weirded out,” Minseok said, watching them skip away arm in arm.

“I’m pretty sure they only use their powers for good.”

Minseok took his hand.

“That’s obvious in this case.”

Over their pancakes, Jongdae considered whether the one loose thread in his life was maybe not so loose after all.

“Do you know Kim Jongin?”

“Yeah,” Minseok said. “He’s in my poli sci class. Do you know him? That kid worries me, I don’t think he eats.”

Jongdae laughed until his eyes watered.

“Bring him to lunch with you, even if you have to drag him.”

So of course the universe aligned itself – or the witches had aligned it – that Jongdae ran into Yixing when he was on his way to lunch, and Yixing had been on his way to meet Joonmyun. So they were all together in the cafeteria, Yixing and Baekhyun mooning at each other, Joon and Sehun blushing and staring at their shoes, and Chanyeol squealing with delight, the first time Kyungsoo caught sight of Jongin. There was an outbreak of romance, Kyungsoo hanging onto Chanyeol’s sleeve like he couldn’t hold himself upright and Chanyeol smiling so wide his head threatened to split open, while Jongin stared at the two of them like it was his birthday and he’d been given _two_ ponies.

“You’re sure they use their powers only for good?” Minseok murmured. “Because this is scaring me with the sheer level of great.”

Jongdae leaned his head onto Minseok’s shoulder and smiled when an arm went around his waist.

“I’m pretty sure,” he said. “Also that I got the best part.”


End file.
